


Time For A Few Small Repairs

by Tozette



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Multi, No obstacle is impervious to sex AND cuddles AND explosions, Silly, There's an ot7, Time Travel Fix-It, cloud is pretty done, disregard of canon, giant poly relationships, tags to be updated but expect:, the time travel fix it trope is strong in this one
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-08-08 19:54:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7771024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cloud's been slipping through timelines for a while now, but this time he thinks he has a solution. </p><p>(He does, but it's not even close to what he thinks.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is posted from my phone, yet again, although the draft has been kicking around for long enough that there shouldn't be too many mistakes.

The thing is. Or was. Or will be? Cloud hopes it’s not _will be_ , but he’s been hoping that for a while now – for a certain value of “a while”. Yeah, that joke’s actually funnier when you exist outside of time. 

Anyway. The thing is, the timeline _needs_ Genesis and Angeal. There’s no way around it, not with the resources the planet actually still has – he can’t go back to before the calamity fell from the sky, all right? Degradation is a fixed fact of their existence, though, and by the time there’s anything like a cure it’s already too late - they’re dead and/or insane, the mako pumps have messed up the planet something fierce, Jenova is shifting her attention to Sephiroth and everything goes to shit all over again.

It takes Cloud two jumps back to the start of this mess to figure out what he has to do about it. He’s not aging, which is… convenient, for now. 

For now. 

He’ll burn that one when he gets there.

Geostigma is the only impetus that gets them the curative water that fixes degradation. Cloud’s tried asking Aerith earlier, when she’s properly alive, but all he’s ever gotten is a confused look and a frown. 

Ironically, weirdly, she has to be dead to be that powerful. 

Which means letting Aerith die. Or killing her, which… no. No.

A timeline where Aerith dies and geostigma happens means a timeline where Sephiroth falls victim to Jenova, pretty much by default. By the time it happens, the wheels are in motion and it’s too late.

All this is why Cloud’s collecting rainwater out by the Sector 5 church into industrial strength containers. 

Because the future? Has solutions for the past’s problems. And Cloud just needs to… take them to the past. 

Well. Sort of. 

Please don’t ask Cloud about paradoxes. He’s confused too.

The idea’s pretty simple, really: he’ll take the water, leave this time for dead and go back to the beginning. Angeal and Genesis’ll get doses with their milk as babies, because he’s got a hunch that it’s going to be a lot easier to slip things into their food when they’re too young to talk or, you know, think. And then Cloud will slip it to Sephiroth, too, even though that might be a bit harder. Sephiroth, he’s gathered, was way better supervised as a child. 

And then he’s gong to march up the mountain, break down the door and _tip the second bottle all over Jenova’s stupid face._

(He should probably keep some for Vincent, too, because even the planet is a little confused about what’s gone into making him.)

From there, Cloud figures it’ll just be all about the straightforward business of sabotaging Shinra. That? Cloud can do that. 

There are only so many times he can watch it go wrong, and he feels like he’s reaching his quota. This time Cloud is going to take them apart piece by piece with his bare hands if he has to.

(It probably says something about his state of mind that he’s envisioning himself pulling down actual pieces of the tower in Midgar bare-handed. Mind-Cloud hurls broken pieces over his shoulders, cheerfully destructive. He starts to wonder if he could. 

Well. He _could_. He knows he _could_.

He shouldn’t, though. 

…It takes him a moment to remember why he shouldn’t.)

It takes about three minutes – depending on your perspective, of course, because time is really very subjective at this point – for all of Cloud’s plans to go horribly awry. 

It doesn’t feel quite right when he lands this time. He seems to be in one piece and so does Fenrir, which is where he’s keeping the water. He checks it, soothed by the clink of metal and the creak of leather. It’s fine. They’re fine. 

He’s got no idea which settlement’s closest, but he can see buildings on the horizon. The town turns out to be tiny, but at least he passes a sign that says Mideel’s thirty five miles west.

He gets looks when he rolls in, suspicious ones, the kind that strangers (or Cloud, actually) get in Nibelheim, which – is oddly comforting, actually. No town like a small town. 

Cloud stops to check out the front page of a newspaper, which is when it all pretty much goes wrong. 

He’s in the wrong time. _He’s in the wrong time._

He tries telling the planet this, shaking up the lifestream. After a moment of profound inactivity he even tries reaching for that dark space beyond all time and purpose, hungry and terrifying. 

The best he gets is a _sleepytired_ mumble from the planet.

It… feels a little like the equivalent of hitting the snooze button. The planet has hit the snooze button. 

He prods it again uncertainly.

_Mmmtimetimetimetired._

What?

_Fifty more years…_

And then there is the undeniable sense of… of rolling over, head under the pillows. Dozing.

And, okay: _what_.


	2. Chapter 2

Cloud does not panic.

He knows that the planet has finite energy. He hasn’t expected it to be quite this finite, or that repeated time travel would deplete it so fast. And now the planet’s rolled over, smacked the snooze button and gone back to sleep for fifty or so years.

That’s probably the planetary equivalent of ‘five more minutes’.

So… he’s stuck here. For fifty years, sounds like.

Given that the headline of this newspaper reads ‘TENSIONS RISING AS WUTAI REJECT SHINRA PROPOSAL’, Cloud’s got… a lot of decisions to make.

He has no money but he’s got the bike and the Buster Sword. It’s not First Tsurugi, because the fusion sword wasn’t Zack’s. He’s left everything else of his original time and his original world behind him. Even the people.

Even Fenrir is from another distant somewhen. 

The Buster Sword has been a memorial to Zack for as long as Cloud's had it, though, and he never can quite bring himself to leave it behind.

Zack’s alive now, he thinks. Now that he’s stuck here, intimately rooted to a new world where he doesn’t quite belong, it has more meaning. Zack’s alive, Aerith’s alive – hell, _Nibelheim_ is alive.

He looks back at the paper. Zack is… Zack is eight, probably adorable and also a terror, and he’ll keep. His parents were good people. They’ll take care of him, Cloud thinks. That’s one thing to cling to. 

(Somewhere else, Yuffie is barely a year old. Cloud feels _ancient_.)

He feels like everything has already spiralled far out of his control, and he takes a slow breath. He knows what his first priority has to be, which – 

“Are you gonna buy that, or just stare at it?”

Cloud looks up. The store’s owner’s watching him critically as he stares at the front of the newspaper. He’s an old man, although he has the lean leathery look of somebody used to tough living and his coveralls are stained from whatever he’d been doing before he came out the front to stare Cloud down. His face is lined, his hair is white and his eyes are dark and suspicious.

Cloud is silent for a few long seconds. He probably has enough gil somewhere – in his pockets or rattling around the cargo bins on Fenrir. He’s not going to, though. He’s got limited money and no connections, nothing better than a sword and a bike to recommend him. Also, he knows exactly what the news will say.

“…No.” A pause. He knows what his first priority has to be, and he‘s going to sort that out just as soon as he can – but for that he needs to get to the Nibelheim reactor, which is halfway across the world from here. And there’s a lot of water in the way. Without air travel – which he can in no way afford – it‘ll take months. “Do you have a job board?” he asks finally.

The old man looks, if possible, even more suspicious. “Try the Seven Sisters,” he says, scowling, and points vaguely down the road. 

This wouldn’t be remotely sufficient elsewhere, but the town is so small it really only has one road and if the building’s on it then Cloud can’t miss it – and he doesn’t. 

_7♀,_ is actually what the sign says, in peeling paint on a dangling wooden sign that creaks in the wind. There’s at least one woman there, young and bored. She’s pouring a beer that’s mostly head for a woman with a cigarette-lined face and heels too high for the time of day, but other than that it’s all lazy fans, sticky floors and the soft hum of mako generators.

The job board is obvious, at least. Cloud ignores the women – both watching, although he thinks – hopes – that they’re just interested in the stranger in town – and heads for it. The first notice has appalling handwriting, but it’s asking for somebody to mow a lawn, mower supplied. 

Most of them are like that: fix my gutters and bring your own ladder, 50 gil; missing pet, 200 gil reward. Small change, nothing really useful. Cloud’s not patient enough for this. He thumbs through the notices. 

Then he sees it – Delivery to Mideel, payment on receipt. Only 700 gil, but _payment on receipt_ means he won’t have to return to get paid, either. Mideel’s not a big city, but it’s big enough to have more work. And from there he can get some kind of transport to the Eastern continent – Fort Condor, probably, unless there’s something travelling west to the Gongaga region, which he doubts.

It doesn’t matter much anyway. He might prefer to travel overland, but it won’t change his travel time much. Nibelheim’s a long way from pretty much everywhere.

He brings the notice to the bar maid, who raises one eyebrow but hands off the package. 

“It’s not valuable,” she tells him with a stern look.

“I’m not going to steal it,” says Cloud, although that comment does make him curious – curious enough that he checks, ten or twelve miles out of town, with a nagging suspicion in the back of his mind. 

They’re old letters, stained and worn at the folds, sent to and from people with names the same as the one on the package. They’re just letters, though – the kind of correspondence he’d have used a PHS for these days.

Cloud feels a lot better knowing he’s really just transporting somebody’s belongings and not something… dangerous. He puts them back carefully. The relief it gives him more than balances out any guilt.

He’s not sure when everything started looking like a conspiracy to him.

It feels good to be on the road again, Fenrir a vibrating hum between his thighs and the wind of his own momentum whipping through his hair. There are a few monsters out and about, but nothing that’s actually challenging – nothing that even requires he slow down, most of the time. 

Mideel is green and tropical and warm under the sun. The lifestream’s close to the surface here, apparently unconcerned with the planet’s impromptu nap. Cloud isn’t sure when he started becoming more and more attuned to it – a couple of jumps ago, he suspects – but now he can sense it a little, a constant and nigh-useless awareness in the back of his mind.

The package of letters gets delivered to a lady so old she seems like she’d turn to dust with a touch. She’s got fine, short curls of snow-white hair and a surprising abundance of jewellery. She moves like every step is a potential disaster and only lets go of the stair rail for just long enough to press Cloud’s payment into his hands with shaking fingers. She smiles tremulously and thanks him in a voice that’s still clear.

There are steps back up to her door. Cloud helps her inside. Her fingers are bony and fragile.

Then he fuels Fenrir up and finds somewhere that’ll sell him food, too – fish, predictably, is cheapest on the island.

Passage to the Western continent is right out, it turns out – there’s only one transport that way: it goes to Gongaga twice a year and consists primarily of maintenance staff for the reactor. There’s a momentary, wistful thought that he could stop by and get a glance at a young Zack Fair – _really_ young, like maybe eight or nine years old… but Cloud’s got actual responsibilities and he’s not keen to wait another four months for the next transport out. 

That leaves him looking for passage to Fort Condor. 

Mideel, for all its tropical beauty, is not really a big or industrial town. It lacks the smooth expensive appeal of Costa del Sol, has none of the excitement or glamour of Gold Saucer and it feels rickety and outdated by comparison to Midgar’s above-the-plate shining streamlined technology. Instead, Mideel is quiet. It’s pretty. It’s… Slower, actually. People are firmly not in a rush, and the air is warm even at night. 

The lazy languor of the place is sweet, but it does nothing to soothe Cloud’s temper. The atmosphere is at painful odds with his mood. He wants to move, to be purposeful and productive. 

Instead he’s looking for a shipping schedule that seems nonexistent. This makes absolutely no sense because Mideel is the biggest port on the island - if anythings’s being shipped to the mainland it’ll come through here first.

“Oh,“ says a huge man with dark skin and darker hair who Cloud finds untangling nets near the shore. “Fort Condor, huh…” his name is Aiken and he turns out to be the one to talk to about boats in the area. 

He smokes nonstop and his huge belly jiggles when he walks.

“Not many,” he admits. “Most of the folk hereabouts are fishermen  - the nets can’t come back empty, and it’s hard to pull anything in when you’re moving at speed. Still, Old Tank’ll take you for the right price, though he’s a grim bastard – or there’ll be a ShinRa freighter coming through in a day or two.”

Cloud nods, although that’s not really what he wants to hear. He thanks the man and spends an hour contemplating the waters and thinking in pensive silence. 

He eats fish for dinner and, with a glimmer of an idea, buys extra. He doesn’t have a lot of gil but if he plays it right, he won’t need it. 

The next day the freighter shows up right on schedule. 

Mideel has a lot of sea worms. The locals know more or less not to bother them, and they certainly know better than to feed them, but… 

It really only takes a trail of dead fish with their guts leaking out to bait one.

There are troopers on board the freighter and they come swarming out to take care of the distraction. It’s a mess of stimuli: boots thudding, voices raised, the smell of hot metal and sea salt and the crack of firearms.

It’s all very familiar, actually, and Cloud slips right past security, bike and all. Fenrir probably doesn’t deserve to be stowed with the cargo – machinery parts, it looks like, as well as some of ShinRa’s absurd mechanical inventions – in the hold, but he’s not going to leave it behind.

When its mako engines rumble back to life and the freighter pulls away from Mideel, cutting swiftly and surely through the waves, they have an extra trooper on board. The uniform feels… well, last time Cloud wore a trooper’s uniform he was sixteen and tiny. He doesn’t like using the helmet to cover his face all the time, either, but if they review any security footage he doesn’t want his face in view.

And, really, it’s ShinRa’s own fault for encouraging people not to ask questions, not to notice anything strange, to keep their heads down and pretend not to notice crime and corruption. There’s not a Turk on board so all Cloud has to do is learn the officers’ names, tell anybody who asks what he’s doing that he’s doing it on behalf of somebody more important, and act like he’s meant to be there. 

Cloud hates boats and ships and planes and helicopters and basically any transport he’s not steering personally. He can’t get properly motion sick anymore, so there’s no barfing, but the memory of motion sickness causes its own nausea. It all gives him a headache and his guts are always just a little unsettled.

He’s pretty sure it’s psychosomatic, but that doesn’t make him feel any better. 

They put in at Fort Condor two days later, and Cloud assures the single corporal who asks that he’s unloading this strange bike on the sergeant’s say-so. 

He says ‘sergeant’ like the man will know exactly who that means.  Cloud doesn’t even know who that means – but he knows ShinRa. Nobody questions it.

Fort Condor is a mess, as it always is. Cloud stays long enough to refuel and pick up what supplies he can afford. He might like to stay and do something about the mako pumps and reactor here, but he has a genuinely more pressing errand before he can focus on stuff like that. 

Besides, if he’s going to sabotage the reactors, he’s definitely starting with the one on Mt Nibel. It was the first success of ShinRa’s new technology, and it feels only right that it should also be the first to go. 

Cloud kicks Fenrir into gear and heads for Junon, trailing dust in billowing clouds. There are monsters in the countryside, of course. He has one run in with something weird, some glowy-eyed guard hound hybrid, but they’re mostly just needle kisses and the odd mandragora. He clears them out when he stops for the night, but when he’s on the move he zooms by and they’re not fast enough to catch him.

Almost all of the other vehicles on the roads are ShinRa transports. The news about Wutai is spreading, and every farmwife and chocobo handler in the region could tell something is up even without it, because there’s so much military movement. Cloud keeps a wary eye on them – it’s all troopers, supply, machinery, even the distant whump-whump-whump of helicopters overhead – but nobody bothers him so he goes on his way and pretends not to think about it. 

_Something_ about the Wutai war and all of its death and horrors is necessary – or at least, comparatively desirable. There’s nothing short of complete annihilation that will stop ShinRa from forcing the issue – he knows, he’s tried - and the one occasion upon which he did wipe them out he’d ended up with a future where electricity was part of a mythical past glory. 

That future had no waste treatment facilities and limited medical technology – and all the people who’d lived it had never before done without. It was… it was bad. 

But watching ShinRa prepare for war, personnel swarming over the countryside like a hive answering the call of their queen? Cloud can’t help but watch and wonder.

Another transport goes past, dark and rumbling on the dusty road, and it’s almost physically painful for Cloud to let them by.

By the time he makes it to Junon weeks have gone by and he’s tired and he desperately needs a bath and, weirdly, impossibly, _what the actual hell–_

Aerith is waiting for him. 


	3. Chapter 3

She’s sitting on top of the ‘Welcome to Junon’ sign, dressed in a blue and white sundress, and she looks about fourteen. She has a flower tucked behind one ear.

“Aerith?” Cloud asks, kind of baffled. 

“Cloud!” She grins and hops down from the sign. Her sundress might be pretty, but her boots are sturdy and she’s holding a wooden staff, which she uses to keep her balance once she’s down. Then she flings herself at him. “You know, I almost didn’t believe it.” 

Her hair smells like -- sweat and flowers, good things, clean things. He closes his eyes. 

He has _so many_ questions. He thinks about them and, finally, settles on: “Shouldn’t you be in Midgar?” He’s pretty sure she should be seven, too, but maybe he’ll stick to the simple things for a while. 

Aerith grins. “Come on.” 

She’s practically magnetic. He follows her, helpless, drawn along on his strings. 

Aerith, it seems, has an itemised list of answers to questions Cloud hasn’t yet asked. Some of them he hasn’t even thought of yet. 

“I’ve been keeping an eye out since the planet stranded you in this timeline,” she says, once she’s cajoled Cloud into buying her an ice cream and they’re walking down one of the long smooth streets of upper Junon. “I left Midgar when you got to Mideel. It took me a little longer to travel...” 

Cloud would bet on it. “You’re older than I thought,” he admits, eyeing her. 

“I wasn’t. A new timeline’s created every time you move, you know. I’m... from a lot of timelines, I think. Or..." she sighs. “I keep wanting to say ‘she’, except 'she' is _me,_ and I’m..." 

She stops for a few long seconds, peering thoughtfully at Cloud’s reflection in a department store window. “I started having these new memories coming in a few weeks ago, and this body... Aerith, at this time, is meant to be a child, but that’s not what I remember being. This body is... adapting.” 

Cloud understands the whole idea only vaguely, which is how he understands a great deal of Cetra stuff. He’s not one of them. Even if he can sense a bit of the planet now, he’s never going to have the same connection that Aerith does. But it sounds like this Aerith, this too-old, too-young woman in front of him with smiling eyes and vanilla ice cream on the curve of her lower lip, is an amalgamation of all the Aeriths who’ve come before. 

“How...” he frowns. How does one person contain all that? He’s not even quite sure how to phrase the question so she’ll understand what he actually means by it. 

Aerith is intuitive, though, and she looks at him with ancient, knowing eyes. “It’s not as difficult as all that,” she assures him. Then: “The lifestream...” she sighs. “It has finite energy. You can only move through time like that so many times before it has to rest -- think of it like getting tired and having a nap,” she adds, smiling impishly.

Since that’s exactly what it felt like, Cloud doesn’t comment. He stays silent, waiting for her to continue. It sounds like Aerith already knows a hell of a lot more about how time travel works than he does. 

“Since it weakened a little when you were stranded here,” she says, picking her words carefully, “I sort of... slipped through the cracks. And here I am.” 

“...You _slipped through the cracks_ in the lifestream?” Cloud repeats. “That’s...” 

“Well,” she says reasonably, “you time travelled." 

That’s... undeniably true, actually. 

Cloud has more questions but in the end, the answer to every last one of them turns out to be kind of complicated. Aerith does her best to explain, but there’s only so many times she can rephrase ‘the planet did it’ before she starts repeating herself. 

“It’s strange, isn’t it?” Aerith tilts her head to lick a drip of milky vanilla ice cream from the edge of her cone before it hits her fingers. 

“...it’s been stranger,” Cloud says thoughtfully. Not _much_ stranger, admittedly, but it has been. 

Aerith’s laugh is silvery and beautiful. 

Junon to Gold Saucer is only slightly less popular than the passage to Costa Del Sol, and with high demand comes high cost. It’s also significantly longer than the trip from Mideel to Fort Condor, and that combined with an extra body makes stowing away much riskier. 

There’s ShinRa military crawling all over Junon. It’s one of their biggest and best-armed strongholds, and right now ShinRa’s a rising star: mako powers everything and their empire is only expanding. Cloud is unsettled, and although she hides it well he can see how uncomfortable Aerith is whenever she’s distracted by a glimpse of a dark, slim-cut suit. 

The Turks here probably aren’t looking for her. And if they are, they’re certainly not looking for a teenager. They both know this, but it doesn’t make either of them feel better. In the end, it’s a silent but mutual decision to retreat to lower Junon and see what kind of work’s going in the area -- there’s no universal job board like there is in some of the smaller towns, but there’s still work in the slums as long as you know where to look and you don’t feel squeamish about crime. 

Cloud and Aerith both know where to look. ...mostly. They end up in a deeply shady dockside bar called The Dragon’s Den, where one small faction among the many gangs in the city holds sway. It’s dark, it’s dank, and in Cloud’s opinion the floors could use shovelling more than sweeping. Tifa would never have let her bar get this filthy. 

Ichirin the Dragon looks exactly nothing like a dragon. She‘s’s clearly of some kind of mixed Wutai stock: a five-foot nothing ball of rage with a wicked scar on her jaw and a really mean-looking behemoth tattoo. When Cloud shows up to ask if she has any work, he gets a switchblade in the face for his trouble. 

Cloud blinks slowly, once, and doesn’t move. The steel’s pressed to his cheek, just under his eye. If nothing else, Ichirin’s hands are steady. He thinks for a second about dealing with it, about killing Ichirin, taking her stuff and going on his merry way, but... 

Ethically questionable or not, destroying the hierarchy of local organised crime’s never a really good idea for a city. Things get unstable. And, more importantly, Turks come looking. 

“I heard you had a package you need delivered,” he says instead, staring coolly at Ichirin despite the chill glint of steel in the corner of his eye. 

A lot of threats fly before she finally gets around to explaining the situation to Cloud: the package contains a rare and valuable summon, and she needs it delivered across the city -- but “dragon” or not, Ichirin doesn’t have the clout to move safely across the city on her own, not with the factional gang violence that’s brewing in lower Junon. Going above is asking for trouble, considering the ShinRa presence. 

So she’s outsourcing the work, and, hey -- for Cloud, risky deliveries are something of a specialty. 

“Okay,” says Cloud. He shrugs. He’s taken worse jobs. 

Ichirin fingers her knife like she’s debating trying to pop one of Cloud’s eyeballs anyway, just on principle. 

“You won’t get paid until it’s done,” she says shortly. 

Cloud shrugs again, but she seems to expect an answer so he hums his assent. 

The delivery does turn out to be dangerous, but not in the sort of breathtaking, knee-weakening way Cloud’s gotten used to. Say what you want about organised crime, but the gangsters of lower Junon have nothing on Sephiroth in a towering, mako-addled, deluded... _snit._

Sending Cloud to deal with these people feels a little like nuking an anthill. 

It’s still kind of a mess, though. The delivery route Cloud figures out on the map is lined with small-time gangsters with things to prove, and every last one of them’s a pain Cloud’s butt. 

“The Dragon,” sneers yet another huge, heavily-tattooed man. He’s hirsute and rippling, and there’s a distinct sense of crushing about him, about the clench of his fists and the shift of his weight. “The Dragon sends us a half-grown guttersnipe and a little girl with a stick!" 

He actually goes on in this vein for some time, but honestly by the time Cloud punches him in the head and leaves him twitching in their wake, he’s long since tuned it out. 

(He knows he’s short, okay? It’s not something he just completely failed to notice for his whole adult life. Especially not standing next to Sephiroth.) 

“This isn’t even a direct line across the city,” Aerith says at one point, several brief but increasingly cranky altercations later. 

Cloud fowns. 

She toes a gangster over onto his back, peering benignly down at him while he groans dizzily. “Excuse me,” she says brightly, leaning over him and clasping her hands behind her back, “how did you know we were coming?” 

Of course Ichirin has a traitor in her group. Cloud’s not sure why they didn’t expect that from the outset. 

It makes their job harder and easier: there are more fights and obstacles and, memorably, a bomb planted in the middle of the city (they do know that Upper Junon is held up by Lower, right?) but if they need to ‘persuade’ Ichirin to pay up at the end of their work, that information might come in handy for negotiations. 

Or they could just beat her up, take her gil and run. 

It’s dirty work, though. There’s a lot of yelling. Glass is broken along their delivery route and blood does get spattered into the mud here and there. It’s a... _process_ , this delivery. 

Despite all that, with Aerith's barriers and healing magic as backup, he doesn’t even fatally injure anyone, which Cloud considers a bonus - the criminal element might be disgruntled by their smooth work, but they’re not frothing at the mouth for revenge. 

“Sorry,” says Aeith, casting a low level cure over a man’s blackened eye and broken nose. “It’s not personal.” 

She leaves him with a snapped shin, because there’s no reasoning with some of these people. If they were able, they’d come after them just on principle. So Cloud makes sure they’re not able, and Aerith makes sure they’re not dead. 

It’s a system. 

Cloud thinks Ichirin is more impressed than she’s trying to let on, especially once she’s received independent confirmation that theirs was a relatively bloodless delivery. 

“Pacifists,” she grunts, as though it’s a dirty word. 

Cloud hides his amusement behind a blank expression and requests his money so they can get going. The Dragon’s surprisingly straight-up about paying them. Cloud will remember that. No doubt they’ll be back in Junon eventually and it’ll be good to have contacts. 

They have to get rid of the reactor here somehow, after all. 

“Is it enough?” Aerith asks. 

Cloud nods silently. They won’t be travelling in style, but Cloud, Aerith and the bike will all be on the right continent without having to stow away. 

They're on the next ship out. The faster they get out of Junon the better. 

War's officially declared while they're in transit. ShinRa's no democracy, so there's no real outcry when its announced they'll be cutting premium services to funnel resources into the war effort. Nobody expects them to consider anything but profit. 

Cloud, trapped on the rolling ocean between one dangerous land and another, tries not to have any feelings about it. 

He catches Aerith's expression when the announcement of a super weapon is made. He's not surprised that she doesn't stick around for long after. 

"Weird way of describing a kid whose balls haven't even dropped," says another passenger dubiously. She's nursing some hideous concoction, braced against the railing in the one spot where they can both see the news and stay outside above deck, where it's a little easier on the stomach. 

Cloud looks sideways at her. He's thinking a lot of things: _just wait until he's twenty,_ and _haven't you missed the point a bit,_ and _is he supposed to be fourteen, I thought he was twelve._

It's this last one that has Cloud pushing away from the railing and going to find Aerith, because if Sephiroth's ageing faster he might be like her, and if Sephiroth _remembers..._

Aerith is pretty sure he doesn't, but she shrugs anyway. "There's not exactly a handbook," she points out. "We'll keep an eye on the news. If he is aging faster, we'll track him down and you can talk to him before he causes too many problems." 

That sounds really reasonable when Aerith says it, but the unfortunate truth is that even talking to Sephiroth is dangerous as hell. There're things in him that call to Cloud, thumping thickly and heavily in his blood, and things that are absolutely insane start to sound a little more reasonable when Sephiroth says them. 

And they can't reset the timeline for years and years. Anything could happen. 

Now that safety net has disappeared, Cloud realises how comforting he's found it. He thinks about the purifying water held safe in Fenrir's lockers. 

He doesn't really sleep that night. "He looks young," he says finally, five hours after sundown, staring at the low cabin roof. The ship creaks and moans around him despite being a new-built model and he feels kind of sick. It's probably dark -- probably pitch black, to Aerith -- but Cloud's eyes are keen. 

Aerith sighs. He sees her roll to face him, silent but listening. 

(Cloud's missed Aerith. Each new timeline means meeting a new Aerith, a new Tifa and Barret and Vincent and-- all old faces that look at him with exactly zero recognition. 

He's started thinking of it as the inevitable price for playing god. But here he feels like he's being given something back, something precious.) 

"Most times, I've killed him young," he admits slowly. "Younger than this." 

He's aware that he seems to contradict himself: Sephiroth's too old, but Sephiroth's too young, and Cloud usually kills him earlier in a timeline, even younger. 

Cloud is not a natural-born murderer of children. When killed Sephiroth in those other timelines, he never thought of him as young or old or child or soldier, or, really, even as a person -- just as an item on a checklist. Dead? Done. 

"You've never tried to keep him alive before," Aerith points out, because she is a mind-reader, or else because she's been watching him on Lifestream TV and knows him inside out. 

"Hm," says Cloud, by way of agreement. 

They're not going to kill him; they're going to maybe have to kidnap him, maybe drug him a little, but they're going to keep Sephiroth alive and see if they can't stop him losing his shit in the first place. 

He can't stop thinking back to the announcement, back to ShinRa crowing about their smooth-faced doll-general with the alien eyes. Sephiroth is so young and too serious. Cloud wasn't even that young when he packed himself off to ShinRa the first time. 

Cloud is old, he is tired, but he is not a natural-born murderer of children. As soon as he lets up on it, Cloud's empathy crawls out from under the rock where he's been keeping it, and all he can think is that Sephiroth is Too Young By Far. 

"When we're done with Nibelheim," Cloud says, "we should go to Wutai and get him." 

"Okay," says Aerith. It's only a minute later that she throws off her covers and stumbles across the two steps between their beds, dragging them behind her. 

She buries them both beneath a pile of blankets and curls into Cloud with her face pressed against his neck. 

Cloud says it like they're going shopping: like they'll just pick Sephiroth up like a pair of off-the-rack trousers, from the middle of a war zone -- one that Sephiroth is at least nominally organising. 

Cloud knows it won't go that smoothly, but the queasiness settling in his belly isn't all seasickness and there's no getting out of it. 

Besides, they'd have to find Sephiroth eventually, and at this point Cloud's plans are so far derailed that, well, why _not_ in the middle of a war zone?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still no idea what's going on, still writing chapters on my phone, everyone's out of character and I don't know what I'm doing. *thumbsup*
> 
> Let me know if there's something you liked :0


	4. Chapter 4

Junon to Gold Saucer or Junon to Costa Del Sol -- the distance to Nibelheim isn’t that different wherever they land, but it costs more, weirdly, to get to the beach than to the Gold Saucer region. So that’s where they disembark, and Cloud is just pleased to see dry ground again. The gangway goes down with a series of steely hydraulic hisses, clanking heavily on the concrete at the edge of the dock.

Cloud elbows his way between the actual crewmembers, ignoring their protests like he actually can’t hear them, responding to pointed questions with grunts that could maybe be interpreted as acknowledgement -- and ignoring Aerith’s not-quite-stifled laughter at the same time.

Fenrir is the most important thing on the ship right now. Cloud wants to make sure the water from the church survived the trip.

He’s not sure what he expected to happen to it, really, but it is quite as he left it. The admiring murmurs some crewmembers make about the bike as he’s manoeuvring it leave him feeling paranoid and suspicious. There can’t be any mistakes and a stolen bike, at this point, would be a disastrous.

“With the way you’re looking at them,” says Aerith, still too lighthearted and amused for comfort, “I don’t think anybody’s going to touch Fenrir.”

With or without Cloud’s intense staring, the other passengers seem eager to get their transports and disappear into the neon and seething humanity of Gold Saucer proper. They still have to wait for their things, wait for their transports --

Cloud’s more than happy to weave through them all and leave them behind.

“Cloud,” Aerith smacks his arm, shock and excitement warring in her voice. “Look!”

He follows the sweep of her hand. There’s a kid waiting for them to disembark, perched barefoot on the back of an open-bed truck that obviously doesn’t belong to him. He’s tiny, with dark hair and big blue eyes, maybe seven or eight, with the overlong clumsy limbs of a body partway through a growth spurt.

He’s holding a sign like a cheesy tour guide, one with their names on it in a rounded childish hand.

 _Both_ of their names.

“What,” says Cloud, who has been thinking he’s actually got the hang of time travel finally. Then: “Oof,” he adds, when the speeding bullet that is a very young, very agile Zack Fair connects with his midsection.

Cloud... picks him up.

Easily.

Because he’s _very small_.

Zack isn‘t even a little bit deterred by Cloud‘s easy manhandling of him, and he climbs like a monkey to his shoulders. Cloud... sort of just lets him. He‘s not sure what to do. He‘s not sure how much Zack knows. He knows something, obviously.

Each time Cloud comes back he avoids Zack, honestly.

He keeps the Buster Sword, carries it faithfully, painfully. But Zack he avoids.

Zack, when he’d known him, was a beacon. He was a hero, a rescuer, a noble sacrifice. He was a bandage for Cloud’s wounded psyche. He was something torn up and stuffed inside Cloud to fill up empty spaces. He was an idol, revered and distant. He was a goal on a pedestal: scarred but determined, cheerful and _so damn cool._

Cloud would be dead without him. Obviously.

But here’s the thing: almost no Zacks are that Zack, because the things that made that Zack were -- are -- _will be?_ \-- terrible.

(Early on, Cloud found himself telling a seventeen year old how he died a hero -- terribly, painfully, but a hero. Zack had done his best, responded gently, grinning and _of course I’m a hero_ and with his hand in Cloud’s hair and a well-hidden panic in his eyes.

It wasn’t the last time, but eventually the last time had come. Now he avoids Zack.)

And by now he knows -- not an intellectual knowledge, not an educated guess, he _knows_ , the way his nerves know pain and his lungs know air: interfering with Zack will break Cloud’s heart. Every time.

(Yes, even that very first timeline. He remembers the sounds of fighting, the death-rattle of Zack’s breath and stumbling alone and lost toward Midgar. Maybe, he thinks, _especially_ the first time.)

With his breath caught in his chest and his pulse leaping, Cloud lets this young, strange Zack Fair climb him like a jungle gym. He is frozen and a little terrified.

“How did you do that?” is the first thing Zack even says, staring at Aerith. It takes Cloud a second to realise he’s talking about her body, which has aged a little even as they’ve been travelling together.

Aerith just shrugs, playfully mysterious.

Then she turns to Cloud, direct and purposeful and as ever much too knowing. “We can all fit on Fenrir, right?”

Now they’re both looking to Cloud, who has to tilt his head back to get Zack in his line of sight again. There’s a bruise on his knee and a ShinRa brand bandaid on one elbow, the product of a clumsiness Cloud knows he’ll grow out of, but all it does is remind Cloud that he’s a kid.

Zack’s a kid, and Cloud can’t ignore him because he obviously remembers something, but -- He’s a lot more fragile now. He won’t be enhanced like the rest of them. He won’t survive whatever Cloud does to him.

The blind urge to flee almost overwhelms him for a second.

In that moment, Cloud wants nothing more than to get away from them both. Aerith too. This -- this closeness, this easy normalcy with them, this is a mistake. His hindbrain urgently advises flight.

But just like he’s not a killer of children, he’s not a sociopath or a schizoid, either. There are parts of him that have gone much too long without. It’s easy. It’s comfortable. He wants to wrap one hand around Zack’s leg and keep him there, perched on Cloud’s shoulders, and to walk side by side with Aerith under the sun. He wants them to know him and to sink into easy familiarity. He wants it so badly he’s almost afraid of the wanting itself, and--

“-- _Stop_ it,” says Aerith, knocking her shoulder into his, and her shoulder’s warm. She cuts him off.

Without analysing it too deeply Cloud tightens his grasp on Zack’s oddly small, flexible leg and nods his head.

“We’ll fit, right?” Zack prompts, sounding too old for his high-pitched child-voice.

“...Probably,” he says, eyeing his bike.

He only has one (frequently-ignored) helmet but he makes Zack wear it anyway. Aerith is an old hand at healing magic and Cloud’s almost indestructible. It’s an easy decision.

Five minutes saw them settled on Fenrir’s huge frame: Cloud firmly in his seat, Aerith behind with her hands wrapped around his waist and her chin digging into his shoulder, Zack looking like a bobble-head doll with the helmet perched in front of him, braced in the vee of Cloud’s legs and clutched to him one-armed.

Cloud can steer Fenrir one-handed, but he won’t be able to fight while he’s clinging to Zack like this.

“Nibelheim?” Zack promts cheerfully. “I gotta say, it’ll be cool seeing it when it’s not--” he pauses. “Uh,” he adds.

Yeah, Zack obviously knows, or remembers, or _something._

“On fire,” Cloud finishes.

Zack scrunches up his face behind the helmet. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Not on fire is good.”

They’re a good hour on the road and Zack is cheerfully, if dangerously, sticking one arm out just to feel the ripping air of their own momentum, when Cloud thinks to ask: “...Do your parents know where you are?”

Because Aerith is an orphan and even if Elmyra might accept ‘Cetra Stuff, Sorry’ as an explanation for her physical changes and sudden departure, Zack is an eight year old human boy and Cloud knows he has parents, has in fact met his parents, and --

“...well,” says Zack. “Not exactly. I left them a note.”

A _note_.

Aerith snorts delicately into Cloud’s ear, and Cloud tenses and hesitates.

After a second, though, Zack tugs Cloud’s restraining arm closer over his own chest.

There’s another second, and Cloud thinks _fuck it_ , mentally adds kidnapping to his list of crimes, and accelerates.

Zack whoops, but his voice is snatched away by their momentum.

* * *

 

It takes them longer than Cloud expects to get to Nibelheim. For one, when he was planning he didn’t think about having company in the form of Aerith and Zack. He’s not going to ask them to travel all night or go without proper meals on the road, obviously.

The distance is longer, too. He remembers the long lonely road and he remembers the steely sky that seems so much higher in the countryside, but he's forgotten the sheer sprawling space. That night they share out what food Aerith and Cloud brought between them and they sleep on the shoulder of the road.

Nobody takes the long way from Gold Saucer to the mines, so the road there is in poor repair. That, at least, means that it's almost deserted.

Lights from the road show up every second hour or so, accompanied by the familiar rumble of a mako engine. Zack sprawls over Cloud's ribs, a strange child-weight upon him. It feels a little like being stuck beneath half a body if he doesn't focus on the breathing, so he does: Zack sleeps deeply, untroubled, and breathes slow and steady. Aerith curls into his side, and even though they're all huddled upon one military surplus blanket spread out beneath the stars it isn't as cold as he thought. Not between the three of them.

Cloud doesn't sleep. He can go a long time without, so it’s not the inconvenience it could be, just an exercise in patience. Aerith wakes up four times in six hours, sighs and burrows closer. She smells good, typically, like grass and clean sweat.

"Can't sleep?" he asks when the sky is edging toward a deep, stormy periwinkle in the pre-dawn silence. Zack doesn't so much as twitch.

"Growing pains," she admits, dry as dust, and shifts uncomfortably. She probably means it literally. There's nothing he can do to help that, so he makes an acknowledging noise and lets it go. "It'll be time soon. Are you nervous?"

It takes him a second to realise she means about seeing Jenova, killing Jenova, which -- no. Not that. He's nervous about a lot of things, but he's killed Jenova before and he'll kill her again and again without losing sleep. Her control over Cloud is at best confused, filtered through Sephiroth's more stable cell structure.

It's Sephiroth who poses real danger to Cloud. In the same way Sephiroth always finds Jenova helplessly compelling, Sephiroth has the capacity become the insidious worm in Cloud's psyche. He's not nervous about Jenova, but he'll have to be prepared and on point when he meets Sephiroth...

...which brings him right back to killing Jenova, of course. There's nothing for it.

(Best if Sephiroth never has the chance to test himself against her, Cloud thinks. He’s sure Sephiroth's ability to influence Cloud must be so much weaker by comparison, because Sephiroth falls to her every time. Cloud always has a fighting chance, and he fights hard.

The thing is: Cloud never once in all his repetitions of this doomed timeline considers that he and Sephiroth just have very different temperaments. In his mind, he still thinks of every victory over an adult Sephiroth as a fluke defeat of a godlike figure. No matter how many times he limps away from that conflict, he can't quite imagine himself Sephiroth's equal.

The truth is this, though: they are different people. When faced with insurmountable pressure, Cloud bends to it and Sephiroth cracks.)

"No." Not about Jenova. Nervous about Aerith, about getting this tiny Zack killed, about falling in sway to Sephiroth, about screwing it all up and condemning them to fifty years of struggling just to keep Gaia spinning on her way before they can try again. There's plenty to be nervous about, but killing Jenova is old hat.

When Aerith demands, silently, his arm as a pillow, Cloud finally sleeps a little.

Zack wakes them with the stirrings of true dawn. His is an adult mind trying to curtail the energy of a young body and Cloud thinks it's actually kind of low-key funny to squint his eyes open and see Zack virtually vibrating. Aerith makes a disgusted noise, the sound of sleepy teenagers everywhere, and pulls the blanket halfway from beneath Cloud when she rolls over. "Mnngh," she declares.

He follows her doggedly and flops a heavy arm over her spine. Instead of squirming away she goes right back to sleep. He follows, leaving Zack making unimpressed faces beside them.

It can't be that long before Cloud wakes again, this time to white-grey light and the rumble of a cargo truck and the steady sound of Zack counting squat reps.

"--hundred forty-two-- Hey, you're awake! Finally."

Cloud tips his head back and examines the sky. At least Zack's hobby's not disruptive.

(...He's still glad he missed whatever word came before 'hundred'.)

Zack, at least, is obviously relieved to be on the road again, even if Cloud has a twig in his hair and Aerith is barely coherent.

"Helmet," says Cloud. Zack makes a face, but blessedly he is in fact an adult and he jams it upon his head without complaining.

Aerith cooperates enough to get on the bike and then she wraps an arm around Cloud’s ribs, buries her face in his warm shoulder and yawns over and over. (Every so often Cloud feels her arm go alarmingly lax and then she jerks, head up, eyes wide, and her grip becomes iron again. He really hopes she’s not going to fall asleep properly and fall off the bike. Aerith, _no_.)

Even tearing along the deserted back roads at appalling speeds -- which is just how Cloud drives, thank you very much -- they don't get to the foothills until late afternoon, hours and hours later. It’s hard to judge their distance from Nibelheim because the mountains always seem big. Falling under the shadow of the mountains does not, necessarily, mean they are close to the mountains. They’re... well, they’re big. They're mountains.

It does mean, however, that they’re a lot colder. By the time the little group stops all of them are filthy, hungry and stiff with cold. Aerith’s hand has crept beneath his shirt, where his skin is significantly warmer than average.

Zack, on the other hand, is clearly about to fly apart at the seams from a mix of exhaustion and pent up energy.

They examine what they’ve got with them. “They won’t be selling a lot of extra food in the village,” Cloud says, with the weariness of somebody who knows his hometown well. Too well, honestly.

There's a stream down here somewhere, though, if he remembers right. It's got a bit too much mako in it to be properly potable longterm for most people, and the animals are bigger, hardier and a bit more aggressive.

Zack volunteers himself to find food, which is probably a good thing -- he'll burn off some of that energy being useful, and even if he's in the form of a kid he’s not actually a child. There’s no reason he can’t go alone.

"I'll be in yelling distance," says Zack, looking wry and resigned. It only lasts for a second before he grins brilliantly and dashes off to catch their dinner.

Dinner is also their breakfast, which... Cloud should have thought this through better, or at least longer. In his defence he wasn't expecting any kind of company at all, let alone a kid and a fast-growing teenager. If it had been him alone, he'd have ignored sleep and snacked a little on the way and probably been close to arriving by now.

He explains this to Aerith quietly. "Then it's a good thing we caught up," she says. He knows better than to argue, although he’s doubtful.

Aerith sends Cloud to bring back dry wood while she makes clear a space for their fire not far from the stream. She pulls a green materia sphere from her hair when they’re done, setting the pile to light with an enviable delicacy and control.

(Cloud never has that much control. Hell, Sephiroth doesn’t, either. Both of them would have burnt all of the wood to a crisp in seconds with the lowest-level fire spell they could manage. The only person Cloud’s ever met who even comes close is Genesis -- and that’s after his swim in the Lifestream with the Goddess.

Aerith is just really, really good.)

“Mmm,” she says, leaning in to enjoy the warmth with a nonchalance like she’s performed the most basic spell possible instead of a minor miracle. “It’s nice, right?” she beams.

Sometimes Cloud is overwhelmed by how much he’s missed Aerith. It’s an aching feeling, even when she’s right there.

He nods, watching the flames dance orange in the waning light of the day. Only then do they brave the icy water of the stream to get cleaned up.

“You’re limping,” Cloud says, eyeing Aerith as she pulls herself out of the running water. He can feel the chill of it, but he feels it with the knowledge that the discomfort won’t result in permanent damage -- safe pain. It takes a lot to damage him. Aerith, he thinks, probably doesn’t have that luxury.

“Hmm, is it really okay for you to be looking?” she wonders, peering over her shoulder wide-eyed.

Cloud blinks, puzzled. It takes a moment for her meaning to dawn upon him, and then he shakes his head and looks away.

Her laughter is just as sweet and silvery as it was in Junon. She looks older already, as it happens, although maybe only by a factor of six months or so. It’s still strange to see how her face changes hour to hour -- but as to what she’s implying, Aerith is not quite old enough to register as a sex object on Cloud’s radar -- maybe in a couple of years, which, given the speed of her aging, could well be more like a couple of weeks.

That’s... that’s not as strange a thought as it could be, and that surprises him.

She’s not really offended though, and so he’s not deterred. “I didn’t think you were hurt,” he prompts.

“Growing this fast isn’t comfortable,” is all she says in the end, right before she scuttles off to the fireside where she can warm up before she freezes.

When he’s dry and clean, Cloud settles by the fire and leans back against the huge weight of the Buster Sword, enjoying the feel of the warm metal through his clothes. He keeps an eye on Aerith, who is rubbing her joints with the ease (and the annoyed expression) of practice.

“It’s going to slow down eventually?” he asks.

“I sure hope so,” she mutters.

They blink at each other over the fire, and Cloud comes to the unhappy realisation that Aerith knows approximately as much as he does about a lot of what’s going on. She’s great at interpreting the planet and the lifestream, but this is outside of her expertise.

He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and tips his head back.

The fire’s warm, Jenova will die soon, and then they’ll go to Wutai and find Sephiroth. Cloud’s not sure where Genesis or Angeal is during this part of their lives. Probably in Banora or Midgar or Wutai or -- that’s three very different locations, spread across the whole damn planet.

He crosses his arms. So much to do.

(And here he is, sitting by a fire, doing nothing. He learnt how to deal with inconvenient downtime as a trooper but it still makes him itch.)

“Stop thinking so hard,” Aerith says again, because she’s good at this mind-reading business.

Zack is, of all of them, probably the most poorly equipped to deal with any of the local wildlife. He’s utterly undeterred by that fact, and seems at best miffed that physics and biology are hovering around like inconvenient nannies forcing him to avoid danger.

He returns wet to his chest, with a fish the length of his forearm and a hare already in its winter coat both trailing from his grip. They're bigger than they should be, because everything in these mountains is. Were the hare still jumping it'd be almost hip high on Zack's child-body -- but it’s not. It dangles bonelessly from Zack’s hand, already dead with its snapped neck.

Cloud has no idea how he caught them -- Cloud trapped animals as a kid, but there hasn’t been enough time for that. He’s killed things with a spear, too, but Zack’s unarmed. Mysterious Gongagan wisdom? He doubts it.

He’s barefoot and carrying his sneakers by their shoelaces in his other hand, and Cloud can see him twitch every few steps when he approaches.

Zack dumps the animals at Cloud's feet, then stands there in his short sleeves and scratched arms, looking singularly discontent. “This really sucks.”

Aerith makes a low, sympathetic noise in her throat. She’s progressed to combing out her hair now, and the firelight gives it a reddish golden sheen.

Cloud looks between them, from Zack flexing his small fingers and eyeing them like he’s been betrayed to Aerith looking at him with those soft, soft eyes.

Right.

“I’ll gut them and clean them,” he tells Zack, getting up and taking the opportunity to leave them to it. Zack caught them, after all, and Aerith is best equipped to smooth over Zack’s temper - he rarely needs much in the way of smoothing, anyway, because of course he’s incapable of staying mad or upset for long. Even after being the one to kill Angeal that first time around, Zack carried the memory with good cheer.

“Oh, good. I’ll cook,” Aerith offers, but her attention is all on Zack, and as he’s leaving Cloud can see her grab him by the arm and tug him closer to her, closer to the fire. Their voices are too low to hear.

Well, there’s no point in leaving the parts they won’t eat to stink up their temporary camp. He leaves them huddled by the fire and turns toward the dark, cold forest to gut some dead animals.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is still "that one time travel story I keep writing on my phone, so, okay, whatever". Let me know if there's something you particularly liked! :)

**Author's Note:**

> If there was something you liked particularly, let me know in a comment! Updates for Crash Course and Sugar and Protein are on their meandering way.


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